Final Tales Of Sherlock Holmes - Volume 4 , livre ebook

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69 pages

English

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In this series of five short stories, Holmes and Watson continue their late investigations into dark crimes in 1920/30s London, joined by their excitable housekeeper at 221B Baker Street, the brilliant, buxom Miss Lily Hudson, and by Jasper Lestrade of Scotland Yard, the ambitious, respectful son of the late George Lestrade. Thanks to Royal Jelly, Holmes is a fit 74-year-old, who has lost his interest in bees and returned to detecting, joining forces again with his colleague and friend, Dr. John Hamish Watson, a 75-year-old unfit twice-widower, who hankers after the good old days of derring-do. Together they explore the case of the Kew Gardens Gnomes and their fiery vengeance; the Portobello Pornographer and the reappearance of an old enemy; the Camden Counterfeiter and the theft of Doctor Watson's identity; the Kensington Kidnapper and the hefty price on Mrs Hudson's head; and the Undiscovered Country, in which a successful writer is haunted by his most famous character.

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	07 juin 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781787051485
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Final Tales of Sherlock Holmes
(Volume Four)
by
Dr. John H. Watson, M. D.,
as edited by
John A. Little

First edition published in 2017 by
MX Publishing
335 Princess Park Manor, Royal Drive
London, N11 3GX
www.mxpublishing.com
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© Copyright 2017 John A. Little
The right of John A. Little to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not of MX Publishing.
Cover design by Brian Belganger
http://zhahadun.wixsite.com/221b

Foreword
The story of how these late adventures of Holmes and Watson came to be discovered has already been related in the first three volumes of this collection. I repeat it now for those few who may have inadvertently missed these books.
The building known to all Holmes afficionados as 221B Baker Street had fallen into such disrepair by 1955 - thanks to the efforts of the German Luftwaffe, and many years after the detecting duo had passed on - that the local authorities deemed it unfit for habitation. It had to be knocked down. By my father, as it happens.
Eneder Little had built up a successful business as a builder in London, having been forced to emigrate from Ireland after the lunatic DeValera’s disastrous economic policies of the 1930s. His company (Motto: ‘No Job Too Big For Little’) was granted the contract to demolish nos 220A, 220B, 221A, 221B, 222A, 222B, 223A and 223B Baker Street and rebuild a terrace of spanking new luxury four-bedroomed town houses, complete with all modern conveniences.
Before the buildings were due to be levelled, he was examining the basement at 221B when he discovered a tall dust-covered office cabinet hidden in a corner behind a dilapidated kitchen dresser. Having no keys, my curious father grabbed his jemmy and cracked open the lock that controlled the four metal drawers. There was nothing but wrapping paper inside the top one, but the other three drawers revealed a series of packages of A4-sized spiral-back handwritten notebooks, each held together by two elastic bands in the shape of a cross. Never having read a book in his life apart from his annual accounts, he had no comprehension of his discovery. But he was a cautious man and decided to dump the lot into a cardboard box and take it home that night. And then promptly forgot all about them.
I became aware of this event when I was helping my mother and sister to clear out his effects the day after his funeral. He married late in life, and returned to live in Dublin towards the end of the 1970s with his wife and two small children.
I had climbed up a ladder into the attic and started handing down cartons of what was obviously rubbish - ancient account books from his building company, newspapers, magazines, old clothes, sporting equipment from his hockey and cricket-playing days - when I discovered a cardboard box, covered by some spare fibreglass insulation. Its bottom was lodged firmly between two beams and pulling it out almost caused my foot to slip off the beam and crash through the bathroom ceiling.
A rapid inventory produced sixteen packages, each of which contained a varying (one to nine) number of notebooks dated from 1925-1930. Later, when we were sitting down, exhausted after our day’s work and with our shared grief, I asked my mother about them and she told me what little she could recall of their origin at 221B Baker Street. I pulled off the elastic band and opened the first notebook of a package marked February 1925, the earliest period. Intriguingly, it showed a faded red stamp with the tiny word ‘Strand’ repeated around the edges, and ‘REJECT’ in large letters diagonally across the middle. It was in surprisingly good condition, for a manuscript that had lain in its cardboard coffin for over eighty years.
I had only to finish a single chapter to realise what I held in my hand. All my life I had been a great fan of Holmes and Watson, and had read their exploits avidly, once when I was a teenager, and again when I had been hospitalised for a week while some varicose veins were being stripped. After a quick check of all the packages, it became clear that we had in our possession one novella-length and fifteen shorter adventures of the Baker Street detectives in the last years of their lives, all of which had been rejected for publication by Strand Magazine for a variety of reasons. One of them pitted the pair against the evil witch of Clapham Junction. Others treated pornography, rape and necrophilia. These were dark subjects for their time, but it occurred to me that Conan Doyle’s later pre-occupation with all things supernatural - caused by the loss of his wife and son - may have been a factor in the rejection of the final detective stories, which, as everybody knows, should always have a rational solution, with no hint of smoke and mirrors, magic acts or spiritualism.
As I read on through that dark night, I understood why the first story had never been published within their lifetime. It concerned a number of quite appalling serial murders that, in the London of 1925, would most certainly have caused public mayhem and a possible breakdown of society, had it been fully reported in the press, or if Holmes and Watson had not finally solved the case. After a small amount of editing by me to smooth out Dr. Watson’s archaic style, this story has been published as a separate novella within ‘ The Final Tales Of Sherlock Holmes - Volume One ’, entitled ‘ Sherlock Holmes And The Musical Murders ’. The first five shorter stories followed in ‘ The Final Tales Of Sherlock Holmes - Volume Two ’. The next five continued in ‘ The Final Tales Of Sherlock Holmes - Volume Three ’. Volume Four, which I trust you are about to read, contains the last selection of the final tales, also suitably edited.
John A. Little,
Portobello,
Dublin,
Ireland.
March 31 st , 2017

Sherlock Holmes and the Kew Gardens Gnomes.
Now that the end is nigh, so to speak, I wish to commit to paper one of the last cases Holmes and I worked on together. This horrific affair occurred during the appalling winter of 1928, a very difficult period in the lives of the residents at 221B Baker Street.
Although the great Thames flood in January had not encroached upon our higher ground in the district of Marylebone, it happened that Lily Hudson’s mother, sister of the formidable Martha from our earlier years together, was unfortunate enough to be staying with an old friend in Bankside, and had been swirled away by the deluge, never to be found. An atmosphere of gloom descended upon our household throughout the rest of January and February, which sent Holmes reaching for his needle, and myself, of course, for the bottle. After all, what would old age be like without an occasional injection of cocaine hydrochloride and a tumbler of the drop that cheers?
Especially if you are suffering from an incurable disease and have been given only a few years to live, methinks.
Our discomfort had been exacerbated by the continuing illness suffered by Lily’s baby and my beloved godchild, young Sherlock George Lestrade, who had spent the first seven months of his fragile existence vacillating between death’s door and life’s black pram. I had diagnosed diphtheria and was treating the sickly mite with a toxoid, mixed with a dose of aluminium salts. Happily, by the middle of March, when this nasty tale first entered our lives, he was beginning to show signs of improvement, and no longer spent all his waking hours struggling for breath. He had even begun to smile at me.
Whereas I doted on the lad, and took every opportunity to look after him for Lily and Jasper, Holmes simply refused to have anything to do with his namesake. Indeed, when the screams from downstairs became too much for him to bear, he took to wearing his wireless headphones to shut out the din. Apart from looking ridiculous, this had the frustrating effect of preventing those casual conversations I valued so highly in our relationship. It was like living with a profoundly deaf person, who kept asking me to repeat whatever reply I had made to one of his penetrating comments on some Times article:
‘Eh, what’s that, Watson? What did you say?’
This was usually followed by an awkward plucking of the headgear by about a centimetre above his ears.
It was while he was trying my patience in such an irritating manner, late one Saturday evening in March, that we first became aware of the Kew Gardens Gnomes, and their roles in a number of arsons.
As with many of our later cases, it was initiated by the sound of our young housekeeper’s boots clumping up the stairs. But before Lily had sufficient time to introduce him, our faithful Baker Street Irregular, Wiggins, the only one of those dozen street Arabs to avoid prison in later life and now a strapping middle-aged man, had burst past her, and literally thrown himself at the feet of the startled detective, sobbing violently.
‘They is gone, Mr ‘Olmes! They is all gone!’ he crie